------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Local comment: Valueless sanctions help no one
ANZUS is still our best defence
China Pressures Taiwan President
Blue Mountains awarded World Heritage status
Greenies claim World Heritage bowed to Govt pressure
Letters: Nuclear power cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels
Conditions in North Korea Said Grim
Group Wants Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Energy Dept: Secrets Wrongly Mailed
Energy labs mailed secret documents to unauthorized addresses
FBI searches landfill for tapes that may hold nuclear secrets
FBI Resumes Landfill Search
F.B.I. to Dig for Tapes Discarded by Scientist in Spy Case

MILITARY
Report Shows U.S. Arms Monitoring Improperly Implemented
Mayor in Colombia Coca Region Slain
Supreme Court Bars Roadblocks Set Up to Search for Drugs
Excerpts From Court's Opinions on Roadblocks for Drug Searches
Florida
Six U.N. officers fired in prostitution sting
Annan says pollution will hit poor hardest
Cole retaliation may be non-military
Pentagon to examine military balloting

OTHER
RECKONINGS Sins of Emission
G.E. SUES OVER SUPERFUND LAW
Coalition: Ski resorts fail environmentally
Plan for Use of Bioengineered Corn in Food Is Disputed
U.S. Wrote Outline for Race Profiling, New Jersey Argues
Profiling May Mean Dismissals
Widespread Profiling in New Jersey
Oakland struggles with cop scandal
FBI searching Los Alamos for Lee tapes
Judge Orders Confiscation of Papers in Terror Case

ACTIVISTS
ALBANY: ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUP CRITICIZED


-------- NUCLEAR

Local comment: Valueless sanctions help no one

Detroit Free Press
November 29, 2000
BY MUQTEDAR KHAN
http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/ekhan29_20001129.htm

SANCTIONS have become the default response of American foreign policy. Emboldened by unmatched power and unchecked desire to project this power, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly used extra-territorial legislation to intimidate and coerce foreign nations to adjust to U.S. interests. The famous Helms-Burton law that required the United States to impose penalties against foreign entities for trading with Cuba is a well-known example.

On many issues, imposition of sanctions has now become an automatic response of the United States, regardless of its wisdom and effectiveness.

Missile and nuclear technology proliferation is one area in which U.S. law requires the United States to automatically impose sanctions against foreign countries or entities such as companies and agencies within those countries.

Last week, the United States waived sanctions against China for helping Iran and Pakistan with missile technology, but imposed them on entities, such as research institutes and private companies, in these two countries for receiving Beijing's assistance.

"In consideration of China's commitment to strengthen its missile-related export control system, we've decided to waive economic sanctions required by U.S. law for past assistance by Chinese entities to missile programs in Pakistan and Iran," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher announced Nov. 21.

This effectively means that the United States would resume processing licenses for commercial space cooperation between U.S. and Chinese companies, and continue talks on extending a 1995 accord on international trade and commercial launch services. But a two-year ban on export-licenses on items related to defense, space and upper atmospheric research and other missile related technologies has been imposed on Iran and Pakistan.

In simple terms, China is not punished for proliferating missile technology, while Iran and Pakistan are penalized for acquiring the same from China. Interestingly, the United States already has sanctions in place against Iran and Pakistan. Iran has been a pariah for nearly two decades with minimal exchanges and no trade with the United States. Pakistan has been under sanctions since 1998 after it tested nuclear weapons in response to India's nuclear tests.

The earlier sanctions had alienated Pakistan, a close ally of the United States. Pakistan felt that it was essential for national security that it maintain a balance of power with its aggressive and huge neighbor, India. By ignoring Pakistan's legitimate interests and penalizing it, the United States reduced its ability to influence Pakistan.

Pakistani officials' responses to the latest sanctions were mixed. They were amused at the elements of the new sanctions because there is no possibility of any crucial technological transfers to Pakistan under the previous sanctions. Thus, in a sense, the new sanctions are meaningless for Pakistan, and by the same logic, for Iran too. But Pakistan and China did respond angrily to the new sanctions, claiming that they are contrary to international law and that U.S. domestic laws do not have extra-territorial applicability.

The punitive value of these sanctions is zilch. They punish nobody. Since China is off the hook, these sanctions do little to deter either China from exporting or Pakistan and Iran from importing missiles and missile technology. What they do achieve is create another hurdle in the development of Sino-U.S. ties and normalization of U.S.-Pakistan relations.

The United States has also managed to displease another powerful player in the region -- India. By waiving sanctions against China, the United States has indicated its preference for China over India, since the direct victim of the China-Pakistan missile trade is India.

The capacity of the United States to influence and manage security and international politics in the region is further reduced. It has succeeded in aggravating three nuclear powers, and has gained no guarantees that the missile trade will end.

Another case against the value of sanctions is Iraq. The United States and its allies have maintained sanctions against Iraq for nearly a decade. Thousands of Iraqi children have died out of hunger, malnutrition and lack of medical supplies. An entire nation has slowly receded into Stone Age. The United States' objective was to get rid of Saddam Hussein or at least reduce his ability to threaten his neighbors. According to the White House and the State Department, sanctions have not accomplished this goal. Hussein's nuclear capabilities are supposedly still in place, and he still has the capacity to invade Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. If sanctions had worked, they would have been lifted to ameliorate the human tragedy of Iraq. Here too, sanctions, in spite of being devastating, have proved to be utterly ineffective.

In the interest of the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy, it is time the use and abuse of sanctions was seriously reviewed.

MUQTEDAR KHAN is an assistant professor of political science at Adrian College. Write to him in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit, MI 48226.

---

ANZUS is still our best defence

The Age
Wednesday 29 November 2000
By DES MOORE
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20001129/A43578-2000Nov28.html

In the lead-up to the defence white paper, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has asserted in his Dunlop Asialink lecture that our alliance with the United States through ANZUS is not only of little value but dangerous. The arguments he advances are unconvincing.

True, any action the US takes in some future crisis will not necessarily coincide with our wishes no ally can bind itself unconditionally into the future. Indeed, even friends have the odd fallout from time to time. But ensuring that Australia survives is in the national interest of the US, and not simply because of the ANZUS alliance or our long-standing friendship. A failure by the US to support Australia would cause obvious concern for its other alliance partners.

Incidentally, contrary to Fraser's argument, the obligations under ANZUS are basically similar to those under the North Atlantic Treaty. In each case the trigger is an armed attack on any party and the obligation is to act to meet the common danger (ANZUS), or restore and maintain security (NAT).

With East Timor, the ANZUS obligation was not formally in point because Australia was not under armed attack. Despite this, to suggest the US was remote and appeared to be standing back reveals a failure to understand the crucial help it provided, both militarily and politically.

Militarily, the US provided communications and intelligence assets, helicopter mobility and strategic lift for many of our fellow participants. They were of high military value in themselves, and the accompanying US servicemen were an important display of US interest in the success of the operation. With the knowledge of further, over-the-horizon support if required, this greatly reduced the risks of interference from the 35,000 Indonesian soldiers in East Timor when Australian forces first arrived.

But the US also provided crucial political help, notably through Defence Secretary William Cohen's special visit to Jakarta and US help in persuading Indonesia to accept an international force. It also encouraged others to participate in the force and helped obtain solid UN Security Council authority for it.

In short, far from illustrating that ANZUS is of little value, East Timor was a splendid example of the opposite! It is unlikely we could have undertaken the venture without the US support.

Fraser also notes that the US intelligence received under ANZUS is not completely an open book. But whatever it is that we don't get (which we'll never know), what we do get is vastly greater in scope and value than we could hope to obtain on our own. That includes much raw intelligence that adds to our own.

And what of the argument that ANZUS is dangerous to us because of Pine Gap and the potential for Chinese revenge against any support provided in a US-China dispute over Taiwan? Australia knew Pine Gap was high on the Soviet target list during the Cold War. We rightly accepted that as part of our contribution to the Western defence effort.

If China were to adopt it as a first-rate target as part of a US national missile defence system, should we take a different attitude today? A US protected by an anti-missile defence system would surely be even more of a deterrent against Chinese action directed at either the US or a US ally.

As to the consequences of a US-China dispute over Taiwan, China must know it could not win a war with the US over the issue and neither Taiwan nor the US has an interest in provoking one. Moreover, even if war were unimaginably to break out through US or Taiwanese foolishness indeed perversity could that only be won by the US deploying a long-range nuclear weapon strategy, as Fraser hypothesises?

One can think up extreme Taiwanese doomsday scenarios in which a US withdrawal into semi-isolation in its own hemisphere leaves America's allies exposed to a vengeful China. But, important as our Asian relationships are, Australia's political and defence strategies must partly be based on our national interest in supporting the world's leading democracy and private-enterprise economy.

Of course, Australia must also increase its defence capacities: successive governments have been negligent in allowing those to be depleted. But we need to recognise that like-minded allies can and do play important roles in any crisis. It is difficult to envisage any country other than the US having a significant role in that regard in the foreseeable future.

Des Moore is director of the Institute for Private Enterprise. His public service included a year's research at the Royal College of Defence Studies.

---

China Pressures Taiwan President

Associated Press
November 29, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Taiwan.html

BEIJING (AP) -- Piling the pressure on Taiwan's embattled president, China demanded on Wednesday that he commit to unification between them by endorsing an eight-year-old agreement that facilitated earlier talks.

It appeared to be an attempt to shrink Chen Shui-bian's room to maneuver in dealing with the issue central to China's policy toward the island: that Taiwan and China are part of a single country and must reunite.

The call was the longest of recent frequent criticisms of Chen, reviled by Beijing for snubbing its demands for concessions. With Chen under fire at home for his handling of the economy and China policy, Beijing is fine-tuning its attacks and reaching out to Taiwanese opposition parties.

In a report issued by the official Xinhua News Agency, Chen was accused of distorting a 1992 verbal agreement that paved the way for the first formal negotiations since Taiwan split from China after Mao Tse-tung's communists conquered the mainland in 1949.

Chen angered Beijing by refusing to accept its claim that the 1992 deal amounted to consensus on ``one China'' and unification, claiming its real significance was in agreeing to shelve such differences and talk.

That led to accusations at home and from China that he was trying to rewrite history.

``The new leader of Taiwan should not play on technicalities on the issue,'' said the report, which in keeping with Chinese practice never mentioned Chen by name.

China suspended negotiations in 1995 in anger over Taiwan's moves to assert its sovereignty. It held missile tests near the island to advertise its threat to bring about reunion by force and demanded Taipei return to the ``one China'' principle as a condition for talks.

Steps toward a resumption of dialogue in 1998 were scrapped after former President Lee Teng-hui termed relations ``state-to-state,'' enraging Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province.

The article recounted the early exchanges over the ``one China'' issue, which it said concluded with a Taiwanese commitment that ``Taiwan is a part of China and peaceful reunification is to be sought.''

While the sides maintained different interpretations, the ``differences are the ways of expression, not the contents of the consensus,'' the report said.

-------- australia

Blue Mountains awarded World Heritage status

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Wed, 29 Nov 2000 21:25 AEDT
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-29nov2000-84.htm

Scenes of jubilation have greeted the World Heritage Committee's decision to grant Australia's greater Blue Mountains area world heritage status.

The committee voted unanimously to list over one million hectares of eucalypt forest as a world heritage site during the third day of its meeting in Cairns.

The Greater Blue Mountains area is Australia's 14th world heritage site.

The region has been recognised for its beauty, diversity and outstanding state of conservation.

Green groups have been pushing for this for more than 10 years, and say the decision will ensure the Blue Mountains remains one of Australia's premier natural sights.

The committee has also encouraged Australia to consider adding other eucalypt forests to the world heritage list, including some in Western Australia.

The director of the Colong Foundation for Wilderness, Keith Muir, has been campaigning for the Blue Mountains listing for 12 years.

He says he is overjoyed.

"To win the debate through all countries supporting the nomination is a wonderful experience," he said.

However, Green groups say the listing does not improve the Australian Government's poor track record on world heritage management.

The campaign director for the Wilderness Society, Alec Marr, says the Government is yet to show a real commitment to resolving issues such as the Jabiluka uranium mine.

"While I'm absolutely delighted that this listing has come through for the Blue Mountains, we remain deeply concerned about behaviour of the Australian Government in pushing for a weakening of the convention and continuing to push for mining in Jabiluka," he said.

"I think while we should all be celebrating the Blue Mountains, we should also be sending a message to our Australian Government that we want them to do a better job in looking after and protecting world heritage in this country."

Govt reactions

The New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, says the decision is a vindication of all the conservation battles that were fought over decades to save the Blue Mountains for future Australians.

He congratulated all those involved in lobbying for the area to have World Heritage listing.

Senator Hill says all Australians can be proud that the Blue Mountains have been inscribed on the list this afternoon.

"It's a wonderful area, it's sandstone and eucalypt forests, the great gorges - it's very special," he said.

"This adds an extra layer of protection if that were needed. It's a wonderful day for the community around Blue Mountains and the conservationists who worked over many generations to save this unique area."

Earlier, the committee failed to take a strong stance against the proposed Jabiluka Uranium Mine, instead recommending further negotiations between the Federal Government and traditional owners.

The committee decided not to list Kakadu as a World Heritage site "in danger".

---

Greenies claim World Heritage bowed to Govt pressure

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Wed, 29 Nov 2000 16:54 AEDT
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-29nov2000-65.htm

Environmentalists have expressed disappointment at a decision by the World Heritage Committee not to list Kakadu National Park as "in danger".

The Northern Territory's Environment Centre and Australian Conservation Foundation presented a joint report to the committee at its meeting in Cairns, condemning the Jabiluka uranium mine and its impact on the park.

The Environment Centre says the committee bowed to pressure from the Australian Government, saying it could not declare a region as in danger without the support of the nation.

Environmentalists say the World Heritage Committee's decision was a result of the Australian Government's support for the Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu National Park.

The Territory environment centre's Mark Wakeham says the committee was reluctant to declare the region as in danger without government endorsement.

"This is a very disappointing decision," Mr Wakeham said.

"And it's largely a result of intense political lobbying over a couple of years fresh from destroying the climate change discussions in the Hague last week, the Australian government's come to Cairns with a very strong lobbying position."

Traditional owners

The traditional owners of the Jabiluka uranium mine site say the Federal Government has rejected a possible solution to the impasse over the protection of Kakadu.

The Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation's Jacqui Katona says talks with the Federal Environment Minister, Robert Hill, in Cairns yesterday broke down.

She says the government does not agree with traditional owners that the World Heritage Committee could provide advice about protecting Kakadu's indigenous cultural values.

"We have proposed a very reasonable process," she said.

"All we are proposing is that the World Heritage Committee continue its involvement in developing a transparent credible process, which is in line with international best practice, and the Australian Government has rejected that."

---

Letters: Nuclear power cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels

Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 29/11/2000
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/29/text/letters.html

Media reports of the greenhouse conference in The Hague have concentrated almost entirely on the lack of agreement about the credit that should be given to carbon sinks (trees). But surely the conference also discussed how to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Why has this not been reported?

If the substitution of renewable energy resources for fossil fuels is the answer, then why isn't everyone doing it, and what other alternative is there? Is it true that:

Solar energy and wind farms could not produce more than 30 per cent of our electricity requirements and are unlikely ever to produce more than 10 per cent in practice?

Less than 1 per cent of the electricity customers in NSW are prepared to pay the extra cost of electricity from renewable sources?

Hydroelectric power generation releases more methane into theatmosphere than using natural gas (methane) itself?

The nuclear industry produces less greenhouse gas than any renewable energy industry?

Nuclear power is cheaper than coal power in many parts of the world?

It is illegal for power utilities to evaluate the cost of nuclear power in NSW and Victoria?

For countries that do not get Russian contractors to build their plants, nuclear power has proved to be the safest and least environmentally damaging source of electricity?

Nuclear waste buried in some parts of the world would cause less risk to local populations than the original uranium ore bodies?

Don Higson, Paddington, November 27.

Our Government may have let us and the rest of the world down at the climate summit in The Hague, but all is not lost.

There are steps which others can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, why can't our State Government, with one stroke of the legislative pen, insist that all new and renovated dwellings include solar hot water systems?

John Martin, Penrith, November 28.

Critics of US nuclear consultant Daniel Hirsch should at least consider his suggestion (Herald, November 24) that an adjudicatory hearing be established to evaluate safety concerns in relation to the proposed replacement nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights.

Residents of the Sydney basin have every right to expect transparent procedures to be followed in the planning and implementation of this project.

The inherent risks should be openly discussed.

A worst-case scenario accident could result in the dispersal of radioactive fallout to a distance of 80 kilometres and it remains a fact that by-products of the nuclear industry are dangerous for thousands of years. A greatly expanded nuclear facility should not be constructed in Australia until existing and future radioactive waste can be disposed of safely.

To quote a leukemia specialist from the United States, Dr Robert Peter Gale, from the book Final Warning, "in the end, we all live near Chernobyl."

Jan Thornley, Blackheath, November 24.

Your commentator Daniel Hirsch is being a little disingenuous when he states the permissible levels of radioactivity in the environment are measured in picocuries as he ignores the volume effects associated with the natural background levels of activity.

The human body contains about 150,000 picocuries of the naturally occurring radioisotope potassium-40 and a fair sized concrete building about 10,000 to 100,000 times this amount.

Aidan Byrne, Wanniassa (ACT), November 26.

Life and death are deeper than the law

I can't agree with Angela Shanahan (Letters, November 24) that a right of an unborn to be born overrides the quality of life issues for that child.

My family, too, has a serious genetic disorder. My mother died at 55, my brother at 14. My older brother, after years of hospitalisation and deteriorating quality of life, died at 30. My sister and I live with the threat of disability or death.

I made the decision not to have children because of the risk of having a child born with this disorder. I would not want a child of mine to live with this disorder, become disabled or die young. I would never want a child of mine to grieve for its mother and siblings as I have.

My sister has recently given birth to a son who is free of this disorder. My nephew is a longed-for miracle and delight. He would not have been possible without genetic research and pre-natal testing.

Angela Shanahan has made her choice. The choice for others should not be complicated by legislation based on simplistic opposition of right and wrong.

Choices are hard; opposition is too simple.

Jemima Kemp, Ashbury, November 24.

Pointing the finger

Health inspectors need not go into the kitchens of food retailers (Herald, November 27). If they want proof that food is contaminated, they just need to watch the assistants handle the food, catch your money, and operate the cash register - all the time using gloved hands.

And that's for all to see! One wonders about the state of affairs behind the scenes.

Felix Orcullo, Wahroonga, November 28.

When three make a pair

After having fun with "that", "had", and "and", how about the words that can be pronounced but can't be spelt? In English, there are three p---s (pear, pare, pair), three tos (two, too, to) and two the--s (their, there).

When I was a teacher, the weekly dictation passage was very competitive because every child with no mistakes got a jelly bean. Uproar ensued when I dictated the following: "Mother was sewing a button on my shirt and dad was sowing seeds in the garden. They were both sewing."

Douglas Reeve, Morisset, November 26.

In a twist ...

It's good that at least a few people are outraged by the Chivas posters, but where are the protests against the sado-masochistic subjugation of men in a certain series of pantyhose advertisements?

Peter Wilson, Padstow, November 28.

Rorting claims put the cat among the pigeons

Gerard Henderson seems to miss the point in his claim that electoral fraud is a minor problem (Herald, November 28).

There does not need to be a widespread conspiracy to change the course of close elections. Several hundred votes in a few marginal seats is all that it would take.

There are many ways other than enrolling the dead to achieve this; I hear in Queensland cats are enrolled.

Any amount of electoral fraud devalues my vote no matter how infrequent or unorganised it may be.

But to me the bigger problem is the public's loss of confidence in the system. Right or wrong, there is a perception that rorting is a regular occurrence in elections.

The Australian Electoral Commission behaves like the three monkeys; seeing, hearing and speaking no evil. This adds to public suspicion.

Cleaning up the electoral roll by requiring ID to be registered on the roll and to cast a ballot would go a long way to restoring confidence in the system.

And I can't see why anyone would have a problem with that. Some animal liberationists might, however, worry about disenfranchising the cats.

Paul Gittings Russell Lea, November 28.

Browned off with pollies

Nice to see the Democrats keeping the bastards (the ALP) honest - for a price.

Mike Farrell, Wellington, November 28.

Why get upset over cash changing hands? After all, it's an envelope, not a brown paper bag. That's why the Democrats didn't tell us about it. See? Everything's fine.

Paul Wright, Sydney, November 28.

I've got it: the $1,400 was a down payment on Cheryl.

Peter Fyfe, Lavender Bay, November 28.

Succeeding Deane

Jocelyn Newman for Governor-General? Are they kidding? Isn't this the woman who wants to make disabled people work for the dole? What an insult to the lovable Sir William Deane to replace him with such a person.

The next governor-general will be the last, so let it at least be someone with a heart and a social conscience.

I guess that rules out any John Howard appointees.

Barry Riley, Dee Why, November 25.

Bah, humbug. Poor Jocelyn, the Ghost of Christmas present, can't get her "moderate" policy through. The Sanctimonious Abbott and the Holy "Wreath", the Ghosts of Christmas yet to come, would send us even more speedily to the workhouse.

Yours in "mutual obligation".

Jenny Goodfellow, Leumeah, November 26.

No party games

"Daahling" (Good Weekend, November 25) purported to be a photographic essay on the party excesses of the wild old '80s.

The largest picture and the one featured by the magazine to promote the piece, was one of me. I am hurling a glass of wine at the camera. Beside me stands an attractive young woman, holding hand to mouth, shocked by my recklessness. It was captioned, Jana Wendt shows what she thinks of having her photo taken.

Let me reveal that I was not at any party. I was in a location chosen by the photographer, Robert Rosen for a series of set-up shots, devised by him. He suggested that I look to the camera and upend the glass in his direction. He also suggested that I sit in the passenger seat of a car and raise my hand up to my face, as if hiding from the photographer.

I have not been known to waste a glass of wine on a society snapper.

However, editors who pass off fiction as fact may present a more attractive target.

Jana Wendt, Sydney, November 27.

Policymakers' obligation

John Benson's article "War beckons where forests are plundered" (Herald, November 27), provides a chilling reminder that Australia's domestic and international policies, must reflect environmental concerns.

Our defence and foreign affairs departments must lobby Indonesia to stop transmigration into Irian Jaya and to stabilise its population through incentives from our foreign aid budget.

Domestically, our population must be stabilised (projected to grow by more than 1 million in five years) and native vegetation clearing halted.

Australia's population is ready to grasp these essentials for sustainable design. Can our political system deliver?

Ralph Bennett, Queenscliff, November 28.

Freedom trains

Thank you, Paul Byrnes, for your fine review of "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" (Herald, November 23).

It's not often that an article or review hits the nail on the head so gently but successfully when making a point: in this case, that "some trains" during the Holocaust actually saved lives.

As someone who came to Australia in 1949 with his parents, I can still recall parts of the trip we made by train through Germany, Austria and Italy before boarding a ship at Napoli.

For decades, I've have felt apprehensive and anxious when boarding a train. Strange for a man in his 50s to be saying that, and yet, after reading the review, I felt a weight slip from my shoulders regarding train travel.

The penny dropped. You made me realise that I/we were the lucky ones, even though we were not all children and not all Jewish.

You helped me understand my life a little more. Maybe you helped some others out there also.

Peter Skrzynecki, Eastwood, November 27.

Food labelling means healthier customers

The Federal Government was disappointed with the decision by State health ministers that processed foods must carry percentage ingredient labelling and declare saturated fat and sugar.

Senator Grant Tambling says maybe the States are out of touch with their food industries (Herald, November 25). Maybe the States are less at the beck and call of big business.

Mitchell Hooke, from the Australian Food and Grocery Council, says the decision will slug consumers with extra costs. There will be little extra cost associated with label changes and great potential savings to the health budget if consumers read labels and buy fewer nutritionally undesirable products.

Costs for companies will mainly occur if they are so embarrassed by having to declare the low level of fish in fish fingers, the lack of chicken in chicken soup and the high saturated fat level in processed foods that they will have to fork out for more real ingredients and fewer fillers.

The new food standards are a win for consumers, but a blow to companies which have been stuffing foods with saturated fat and sugar.

Dr Rosemary Stanton, Nutritionist, Kangaroo Valley, November 27.

-------- korea

Conditions in North Korea Said Grim

Associated Press
November 29, 2000 Filed at 6:57 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-NKorea-US-Congressman.html

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Food and power shortages remain as dire as ever in parts of North Korea outside Pyongyang, a U.S. congressman said Wednesday after a rare trip away from the capital.

The few foreigners who visit North Korea are usually not allowed to leave the showcase capital city. But U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, was permitted to tour the eastern industrial town of Chongjin as well as rural areas that have been hard hit by years of bad weather and economic mismanagement.

``You need to travel outside the capital and into the countryside and you'll discover that things are very bleak and very cold,'' Hall said at a news conference in Seoul, the South Korean capital, a day after finishing his four-day trip to the North.

Despite a history of enmity, the United States is a major donor of food to North Korea. The North has allowed some food aid officials to travel outside the capital, including Hall, who founded the Congressional Hunger Center to study and publicize hunger issues.

Hall's comments came on the same day that U.N. aid agencies appealed for $68 million in aid to buy grain and help prevent famine in North Korea. The U.N. appeal -- the sixth since chronic food shortages struck North Korea in 1995 -- demonstrated that Pyongyang remains dependent on foreign aid despite its recent efforts to break out of diplomatic isolation.

The North has struggled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Droughts, floods and tidal waves in the last five years caused famines that killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and pushed North Korea's ailing economy and collective agricultural system toward collapse.

In October, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang and held reconciliation talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. She attended banquets and held talks in stately government rooms, but Hall said he saw a picture of a government that cannot provide the most basic resources for its people.

He said the main hospital in Onchon district, south of Pyongyang, gets only one to one-and-a-half hours of electricity a day and has virtually no heating. Sanitation is poor, the 88 patients get only seven ounces of food a day and there are neither antibiotics nor aspirin, Hall said.

Hall said a North Korean official told him: ``It can't get any worse because we are at the rock bottom.''

At his news conference, Hall displayed a coil of dry, compressed brown noodles that he said was made at an ``alternative food'' factory in Chongjin. The ground-up ingredients were 40 percent grain and 60 percent twigs, leaves and bark, he said.

International aid workers in North Korea have said food shortages, while still widespread, are not as severe as they were a couple of years ago. But the lack of electricity in most buildings, including medical facilities and nurseries, looms as a major problem as another harsh winter begins.

In 1994, Washington agreed to help build North Korea two nuclear reactors to meet its power needs in exchange for the North freezing its own nuclear program. Washington promised to build the first light-water reactor by 2003, but delays have plagued the project, infuriating the North Koreans.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

Group Wants Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Associated Press
November 29, 2000 Filed at 5:33 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Tests.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Declaring that the spread of nuclear weapons technology may be the most serious threat to U.S. security, a group of former U.S. arms negotiators and scientists is trying to rally the next administration to push for Senate approval of a treaty to ban testing.

George W. Bush is against the ban. Vice President Al Gore supports the treaty.

It was turned down by the Senate a year ago. A ``white paper'' issued by the group, the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, partly blamed the Clinton administration and other backers of the treaty for ``lack of preparation.''

Mostly, though, the report asserts that the treaty was defeated because of unfounded concerns that the United States could not maintain an effective nuclear arsenal without test explosions and that other countries could cheat without detection.

The United States does not need tests outlawed by the treaty ``to maintain full confidence in its weapons stockpile,'' the report said. The vast majority of components in a nuclear weapon can be examined, tested and upgraded without nuclear explosions.

As for cheating, the report said a combination of an extensive, remote monitoring system and onsite inspections ``allows for high confidence that cheaters will be detected in a timely fashion.''

``Given that nuclear proliferation is probably the most serious threat to U.S. national security, and given the confidence that the U.S. deterrent can and will be fully maintained under the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), it is clear the United States will run fewer dangers with the CTBT in force than without it,'' the report said.

The group, headed by former U.S. arms control director and negotiator Thomas Graham Jr., said ratifying the treaty would allow the United States to reassert its leadership in the area of arms control and nonproliferation.

``The treaty will tell the world that the United States is committed to arms control, fulfill its NPT (Non-Prolferation Treaty) obligations and is willing to rein in its own nuclear program,'' the report said.

---

Energy Dept: Secrets Wrongly Mailed

Associated Press
November 29, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Energy-Security.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Already shaken by security lapses, the Energy Department is now acknowledging that 15 percent of classified documents mailed from three government nuclear laboratories last year went to addresses not approved to receive such material.

Department officials insist the errant mailings, disclosed in a new report from the agency's inspector general, did not compromise security and that the problem has been fixed.

But that assessment was challenged Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.

``They don't know that,'' said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. ``You can rationalize, justify just about anything, but at the end of the day, you don't know what might have been lost. You have to fear the worst in a situation like that.''

The Energy Department keeps a computer database of addresses that are eligible to receive classified data. Anyone mailing classified data is supposed to check this list to ensure the address is approved.

The report said the mailings to unauthorized addresses were discovered in May, shortly after two computer disks containing nuclear secrets disappeared from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The disks reappeared three months later behind a copying machine at the lab.

Department security officials alerted by the agency's inspector general acknowledged that the mailings violated department policy but concluded that no classified information was compromised. They blamed contractors who did not have access to the list of approved addresses.

But Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman disagreed. In his report to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, he blamed a ``breakdown in the execution of internal controls designed to prevent transmittal of classified documents to inappropriate recipients.''

Richardson's spokesman said agencies involved have recommended ways to correct the shortcomings. ``I'm confident that General Gordon ... will work to ensure the fixes are made so the problems and errors are not repeated,'' spokesman Stu Nagurka said. Air Force Gen. John Gordon heads the National Nuclear Security Administration, created by Congress last year to oversee the labs.

In a Nov. 14 memo to Friedman, Deputy Energy Secretary T.J. Glauthier said the department is developing new rules under which contractors could lose some contract payments and be fined up to $100,000 if they fail to protect classified information. He said the new rules will be announced by May 31.

The investigation examined 177 mailings of classified documents last year from the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.

Investigators found that 27 of the mailings, or about 15 percent of those reviewed, were sent to other federal agencies or federal contractors that were not in the database of approved addresses.

Shelby has been an outspoken critic of security lapses at Energy Department labs. Last year, Los Alamos fired scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was later indicted on 59 federal felonies for improperly transferring nuclear secrets to portable computer tapes.

Lee pleaded guilty to one count in September and was set free after he agreed to cooperate with investigators searching for missing computer tapes with nuclear weapons data. FBI agents searched for the tapes this week in a landfill near the Los Alamos lab.

The case against Lee stemmed from an investigation of possible Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, but the Taiwan-born Lee denied spying and was never charged with espionage. While Lee was imprisoned, the two computer disks disappeared and then reappeared at the lab.

An FBI investigation into those computer disks is continuing. The University of California, which manages the Los Alamos lab, announced earlier this month it has disciplined workers because of the missing disks, but the number of workers and the nature of the discipline was not disclosed.

-------- new mexico

Energy labs mailed secret documents to unauthorized addresses

Seattle Times
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
By David Pace The Associated Press
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=secure30&date=20001129

WASHINGTON -- Already shaken by security lapses, the Energy Department is now acknowledging that 15 percent of classified documents mailed from three nuclear-weapons laboratories last year went to addresses not approved to receive such material.

Department officials insist the errant mailings, disclosed in a new report from the agency's inspector general, did not compromise security and that the problem has been fixed.

But that assessment was challenged yesterday by the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.

"They don't know that," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. "You can rationalize, justify just about anything, but at the end of the day, you don't know what might have been lost. You have to fear the worst in a situation like that."

The Energy Department keeps a computer database of addresses that are eligible to receive classified data. Anyone mailing classified data is supposed to check this list to ensure the address is approved.

The report said the mailings to unauthorized addresses were discovered in May, shortly after two computer disks containing nuclear secrets disappeared from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The disks reappeared three months later behind a copying machine at the lab.

Department security officials alerted by the agency's inspector general acknowledged that the mailings violated department policy but concluded that no classified information was compromised. They blamed contractors who did not have access to the list of approved addresses.

But Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman disagreed. In his report to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, he blamed a "breakdown in the execution of internal controls designed to prevent transmittal of classified documents to inappropriate recipients."

Richardson did not respond to a request for comment on the report.

But Floyd Thomas of the National Nuclear Security Administration, created by Congress last year to oversee the labs, called the report helpful and said the agency supports Deputy Energy Secretary T.J. Glauthier's plan to crack down on contractors who mishandle classified materials.

In a Nov. 14 memo to Friedman, Glauthier said the department is developing new rules under which contractors could lose some contract payments and be fined up to $100,000 if they fail to protect classified information. He said the new rules will be announced by May 31.

The investigation examined 177 mailings of classified documents last year from the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.

Investigators found that 27 of the mailings, or about 15 percent of those reviewed, were sent to other federal agencies or federal contractors that were not in the database of approved addresses.

Shelby has been an outspoken critic of security lapses at Energy Department labs. Last year, Los Alamos fired scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was later indicted on 59 federal felonies for improperly transferring nuclear secrets to portable computer tapes.

Lee pleaded guilty to one count in September and was set free after he agreed to cooperate with investigators searching for missing computer tapes with nuclear weapons data. FBI agents searched for the tapes this week in a landfill near the Los Alamos lab.

---

FBI searches landfill for tapes that may hold nuclear secrets

Pioneer Planet
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/2/news/docs/022227.htm

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. Federal agents searched a county landfill Tuesday amid a report that data tapes downloaded by former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee might be buried in the rubble.

Albuquerque television station KOAT reported Tuesday that agents were seeking the Lee tapes. Lee has said the tapes he downloaded were destroyed.

``The FBI is conducting a search at the Los Alamos landfill in furtherance of an ongoing investigation,'' agent Doug Beldon said in Albuquerque.

Neither Beldon nor Justice Department officials in Albuquerque and Washington, D.C., would elaborate. But a source with knowledge of the case, insisting on anonymity, confirmed the search does relate to the Lee investigation.

After spending nine months in custody, Lee was freed Sept. 13, when he pleaded guilty to one count of illegally downloading restricted data to an unsecure tape.

Lee swore he never passed any secrets to any unauthorized person and that he destroyed the tapes when his security clearance was revoked last year.

Stacy Cohen, a Los Angeles spokeswoman for the Lee family and legal team, said she could not comment on the Los Alamos County landfill search, but added: ``Wen Ho continues to cooperate with the government.''

Lee has been undergoing a debriefing in which he agreed, as a condition of his plea agreement, to answer agents' questions about what happened to the data tapes.

---

FBI Resumes Landfill Search

Associated Press
November 29, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Scientist-Secrets.html

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) -- FBI agents resumed their digging in a snow-covered county landfill on Wednesday in a search for computer tapes containing nuclear weapons data from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The agents had used a bulldozer to move mounds of garbage Tuesday and erected a large floodlight to work late into the night in the search for missing tapes on which former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee downloaded the restricted information.

Lee has said he destroyed the tapes. If anything were thrown into the trash at the laboratory, the landfill is one place it could end up, lab spokesman James Rickman said.

FBI agent Doug Beldon confirmed Wednesday that the search had resumed.

Beldon had said Tuesday that the FBI was searching the Los Alamos landfill but neither he nor Justice Department officials would elaborate.

However, a source with knowledge of the case, insisting on anonymity, confirmed the search relates to the Lee investigation.

The search is expected to last several weeks.

Trash from the laboratory would have been compressed, said Ray Sisneros, solid waste manager for Los Alamos County. He said the tapes would be buried in a layer of trash 6 to 8 feet deep and covered by 2 feet of topsoil.

After spending nine months in custody, Lee was freed Sept. 13 when he pleaded guilty to one count of illegally downloading restricted data to an unsecure tape. Fifty-eight counts were dropped.

The former nuclear scientist swore he never passed secrets to any unauthorized person and that he destroyed the tapes when his security clearance was revoked last year.

Stacy Cohen, a Los Angeles spokeswoman for the Lee family and legal team, said she could not comment on the landfill search, but added: ``Wen Ho continues to cooperate with the government.''

Lee attorney John Cline said he didn't know about the search until reporters called him. Assistant U.S. Attorney George Stamboulidis declined to comment.

Former U.S. Attorney John Kelly, who began the prosecution of Lee last year, first mentioned the landfill the day before Lee was freed.

Lee has been undergoing a debriefing in which he agreed, as a condition of his plea agreement, to answer agents' questions about what happened to the data tapes. Because of that, Kelly had said: ``We're going to know whether those tapes are in Taiwan or in a bank-deposit box at Bank of America or in the Los Alamos County landfill.''

Agents had said their concern over seven data tapes led them to oppose bail for Lee during nine months of pretrial wrangling. Agents found three data tapes early on and demanded to know what happened to the others, which contained nuclear weapons testing and design data.

After he was released, Lee told investigators for the first time that he had made copies of all 10 tapes and had disposed of the copies as well, FBI and Justice Department officials reported in September.

---

F.B.I. to Dig for Tapes Discarded by Scientist in Spy Case

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By JAMES STERNGOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/national/29ALAM.html

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 28 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has moved heavy equipment into a landfill outside Los Alamos, N.M., in search of the computer tapes on which Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear scientist, has admitted to downloading weapons secrets.

This needle-in-a-haystack search is the result of information that Dr. Lee provided to investigators as part of a plea agreement he struck with the government in September, government officials said. It could help solve one of the central mysteries in Dr. Lee's case: what happened to the 3M brand DC 6150 computer tape cartridges on which the highly sensitive weapons information was illegally placed.

Officials close to the case said that the government has known since Sept. 13, when Dr. Lee entered a plea to one felony count, that he put the tapes in the garbage, and that they probably ended up in the landfill. But it was unclear why it has taken agents more than two months to begin digging.

Doug Beldon, an F.B.I. special supervisory agent in Albuquerque, would say only, "The F.B.I. is conducting a search at a Los Alamos, N.M., landfill in furtherance of an ongoing investigation."

But government officials confirmed that the goal was to locate Dr. Lee's computer tapes.

John Cline, a lawyer for Dr. Lee, said he would have no comment.

Dr. Lee, a former weapons scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, had originally been charged in a 59-count indictment with illegally downloading a trove of weapons data with the intention of aiding a foreign nation and harming the United States.

Dr. Lee spent more than nine months in solitary confinement and was described as a grave risk to national security. But the government dropped almost its entire case and Dr. Lee pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling secrets.

Dr. Lee won his freedom and agreed to explain why he had downloaded the data and what happened to the tapes, at least seven of which were missing. His lawyers had said earlier that he destroyed the missing tapes and that no one else had access to them.

Dr. Lee has had eight meetings with government officials over the past two months, and two more are expected in mid-December.

Officials said that during the sessions Dr. Lee told officials that he had put the tapes in the garbage at the laboratory. Government agents were then able to determine roughly what part of the landfill they were emptied into, and that is where the F.B.I. now intends to begin its search.

The tapes are regarded by the government as being of vital importance - in court hearings they were said to have information that could allow another nation to create nuclear bombs - and have been the focus of an enormous government investigation, both to preserve them and to keep them from falling into enemy hands.

The tapes contain, or at least had once contained, a virtual library of nuclear weapons testing and design data, and Dr. Lee had created them over a period of years.

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Report Shows U.S. Arms Monitoring Improperly Implemented

jointogether.org
11/29/00
http://www.jointogether.org/gv/default.jtml?O=265226

A recent U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report found that the Pentagon's Foreign Military Sales (FMS) end-use monitoring system for arms is not being properly implemented, the Arms Sales Monitor, a publication of the Federation of American Scientists Fund, reported in its November issue.

Under the law, the U.S. State and Defense Departments are required to conduct end-use monitoring of arms sold under their export programs. The purpose of the monitoring is to ensure that there is no diversion or misuse of U.S.-origin weapons. The monitoring requirement also determines that weapons are safely stored.

According to the August GAO report, "Foreign Military Sales: Changes Needed to Correct Weaknesses in End Use Monitoring Program," security-assistance officers in 40 out of 68 countries surveyed did not verify whether U.S. weapons were being properly used and safeguarded.

"Unified Command officials do not hold field personnel accountable for not performing the observation function for equipment transferred through the FMS program because of the lack of guidance from the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA)," the report stated. "The officials want field personnel to spend their time on their primary duty, which is to work with foreign governments on planning the acquisition of defense equipment."

Among the numerous shortfalls found in the report were inadequate training and the lack of a mechanism to inform field officers when and where end-use monitoring should be carried out. The report found that DSCA officers are paying little attention to the use of U.S.-origin weapons.

-------- colombia

Mayor in Colombia Coca Region Slain

New York Times
November 29, 2000 Filed at 1:03 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Colombia-Mayor-Slain.html

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Only an hour after he described the ``terror'' afflicting his town, a mayor in Colombia's major coca-growing region was shot dead Wednesday by gunmen riding on a motorcycle.

The killing of Carlos Rosas, mayor of Orito, comes at the same time that U.S.-backed Colombian forces are preparing a major counternarcotics offensive in the southern region.

The gunmen shot Rosas four times at point-blank range as he walked out of his home, said Alvaro Salas, an official of the Putumayo state government, which encompasses Orito. The gunmen escaped and their identities were unknown.

The daylight assassination comes just a day after the mayor-elect of another Putumayo town, Sibundoy, was shot and wounded, and two weeks after a bomb in a main town, Puerto Asis, exploded, killing two people and wounding 17.

State officials on Wednesday were holding an emergency security council meeting to discuss ways to dampen spiraling violence in the region, which lies about, 320 miles southwest of the capital, Bogota.

The army is largely in control of Orito, Puerto Asis and other towns and says it is battling to retake control of outlying areas from leftist rebels who have imposed a road blockade in Putumayo. Most of the world's coca, from which cocaine is made, is grown in the southern state.

Meanwhile, members of a right-wing paramilitary group, many of whose members are former government soldiers, are fighting the rebels for control of Putumayo's lucrative coca fields, which the armed groups tax, generating huge profits. The paramilitaries have also been killing suspected guerrilla sympathizers.

``The truth is that there is great uncertainty when supplies don't arrive, and when the sick suffer, it becomes desperate,'' Rosas said in an interview Wednesday on Radionet. ``Furthermore, corpses have been appearing, cars are being burned, and this terrifies everyone.''

An hour after speaking in the national radio broadcast, Rosas was dead.

U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey, meanwhile, said momentum for the anti-drug offensive is building. The so-called Push Into Southern Colombia is part of a $1.3 billion American aid package.

The plan is financing training of Colombian army troops by U.S. special forces at Larandia army base in southern Colombia and delivery of dozens of U.S. combat helicopters, most of which will be based at Tres Esquinas, another Colombian army base in the south.

``Huge construction programs (are) going on in Tres Esquinas to extend the runway, helicopters (are) showing up in Larandia, aircraft are going to show up in Tres Esquinas in the coming months,'' McCaffrey, a former U.S. Army general, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.

-------- drug war

Supreme Court Bars Roadblocks Set Up to Search for Drugs

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/national/29SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - Police roadblocks aimed at discovering drugs violate the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled today in an important decision reaffirming the Fourth Amendment prohibition against searches and seizures that are not based on a suspicion of individual wrongdoing.

"Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the 6-to-3 majority.

The dissenters were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The majority agreed with a ruling last year by the federal appeals court in Chicago, holding that the City of Indianapolis had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of motorists whom the police stopped at drug- interdiction checkpoints that were set up on city streets six times in 1998.

Pulling over cars in sequence, the police would check a driver's license and registration and then walk a specially trained dog around the car to sniff for drugs. The police stopped more than 1,100 cars and made more than 100 arrests. More than half were for drug-related crimes, and the rest were for license problems or other offenses.

The Indianapolis case was closely watched by cities and law enforcement agencies around the country. The National League of Cities told the Supreme Court in a brief that other cities were ready to adopt the Indianapolis program if the court upheld it.

In a case from Michigan 10 years ago, the Supreme Court upheld sobriety checkpoints as a means of protecting public safety by getting drunken drivers off the road.

The court had also ruled in the past that a sniff by a drug-detecting dog, which is commonly used at airports, is so minimally intrusive as not to constitute a search.

Taking those precedents together, Indianapolis argued that adding a drug-sniffing dog to a checkpoint could not convert a lawful police practice into one that was unconstitutional.

But Justice O'Connor said the purpose of the checkpoint made all the difference. While sobriety checkpoints served to protect the public from an "immediate, vehicle-bound threat to life and limb," she said, roadblocks for drug detection primarily served the ordinary law enforcement interest in crime control.

"We cannot sanction stops justified only by the generalized and ever-present possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any given motorist has committed some crime," Justice O'Connor said, adding, "We are particularly reluctant to recognize exceptions to the general rule of individualized suspicion where governmental authorities primarily pursue their general crime control ends."

In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquist said that because the Indianapolis checkpoints could be used validly to check for alcohol use or license irregularities, it was "constitutionally irrelevant" that the city "also hoped to interdict drugs."

In a separate dissent, Justice Thomas said he doubted that the Constitution's framers would have regarded any roadblocks as acceptable but that since the court's precedents were not open for re-examination in this case, "I believe that those cases compel upholding the program at issue here."

The majority today might well have been influenced by the analysis of the issue contained in the lower court's opinion by Judge Richard A. Posner, whose views often carry particular weight among the more conservative justices.

Judge Posner said in his opinion for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that the logic of the Indianapolis position could justify "totalitarian" police methods, even setting up metal detectors in front of people's homes to detect illegal weapons.

Indianapolis had argued that the severity of the drug problem justified the roadblocks.

Granting that drugs create "social harms of the first magnitude," Justice O'Connor said, "the gravity of the threat alone" was not sufficient to justify dispensing with individual suspicion.

Justice O'Connor said that only in "limited circumstances" had the court been willing to set aside the requirement of individual suspicion. The examples she offered included drug-testing of customs agents, transportation workers and student athletes, which the court's precedents have justified as serving "special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement."

Kenneth J. Falk, who brought the case against Indianapolis as legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Indiana affiliate and who argued the case last month, said today that the decision was an important reaffirmation of the Fourth Amendment principle that "the police cannot conduct a criminal investigation without cause."

In an interview, Mr. Falk said that "the concern of civil libertarians was that the court had appeared to be drifting away" from that view of the Fourth Amendment and toward a general balancing of law enforcement needs and personal privacy concerns.

The court has been deferential to the police in defining the type of suspicion necessary to justify police action, an approach that this opinion does not change.

Last term, for example, the court ruled that flight at the mere sight of a police officer can be suspicious enough to justify an officer in chasing and frisking the person.

There were also these other developments today.

Court Broadcasts

With a growing list of news organizations continuing to press for television coverage of Friday's argument in the Florida election case, the court maintained its television ban but announced that it would make an audio recording available as soon as possible after the 90-minute session.

The recording will be given to a network pool for immediate broadcast.

The modest step was a considerable breakthrough for the court. Audio tapes of arguments are normally available through the National Archives a year or more after the arguments take place.

Meanwhile, two senators who have sponsored a bill to open all federal courts to television wrote to the justices to ask that cameras be permitted at Friday's session.

Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, co- sponsors of the "Sunshine in the Courtroom" bill, told the court that it should follow the model of the Florida Supreme Court.

Senator Schumer said the court's decision to release the audio transcript was "a great first step toward televising court proceedings."

Arbitration Upheld

The Court voted 9 to 0 to uphold an arbitrator's decision reinstating a truck driver whom an employer wanted to dismiss for failing two drug tests. The decision, with an opinion by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, affirmed a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va.

The employer, a coal company, argued that although the union contract provided for binding arbitration, the reinstatement of a drug- using truck driver violated "public policy."

But Justice Breyer said that the policy in this situation was set by Congress and the Transportation Department, which had detailed rules on drug use in the transportation industry that did not require dismissal in this case. The decision was Eastern Coal Corp. v. United Mine Workers, No. 99-1038.

---

Excerpts From Court's Opinions on Roadblocks for Drug Searches

New York Times
November 29, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/politics/29STEX.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - Following are excerpts from the Supreme Court's decision today striking down police roadblocks for drug searches. The vote in Indianapolis v. Edmund was 6 to 3. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion; Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote the dissent.

FROM THE DECISION By Justice O'Connor

We have never approved a checkpoint program whose primary purpose was to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing. Rather, our checkpoint cases have recognized only limited exceptions to the general rule that a seizure must be accompanied by some measure of individualized suspicion. We suggested in Prouse [v. Delaware] (1979) that we would not credit the "general interest in crime control" as justification for a regime of suspicionless stops. Consistent with this suggestion, each of the checkpoint programs that we have approved was designed primarily to serve purposes closely related to the problems of policing the border or the necessity of ensuring roadway safety. Because the primary purpose of the Indianapolis narcotics checkpoint program is to uncover evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing, the program contravenes the Fourth Amendment.

Petitioners propose several ways in which the narcotics-detection purpose of the instant checkpoint program may instead resemble the primary purposes of the checkpoints in [Michigan v.] Sitz (1990) and [United States v.] Martinez-Fuerte (1976). Petitioners state that the checkpoints in those cases had the same ultimate purpose of arresting those suspected of committing crimes. Securing the border and apprehending drunk drivers are, of course, law enforcement activities, and law enforcement officers employ arrests and criminal prosecutions in pursuit of these goals. If we were to rest the case at this high level of generality, there would be little check on the ability of the authorities to construct roadblocks for almost any conceivable law enforcement purpose. Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life.

Petitioners also emphasize the severe and intractable nature of the drug problem as justification for the checkpoint program. There is no doubt that traffic in illegal narcotics creates social harms of the first magnitude. The law enforcement problems that the drug trade creates likewise remain daunting and complex, particularly in light of the myriad forms of spinoff crime that it spawns. The same can be said of various other illegal activities, if only to a lesser degree. But the gravity of the threat alone cannot be dispositive of questions concerning what means law enforcement officers may employ to pursue a given purpose. Rather, in determining whether individualized suspicion is required, we must consider the nature of the interests threatened and their connection to the particular law enforcement practices at issue. We are particularly reluctant to recognize exceptions to the general rule of individualized suspicion where governmental authorities primarily pursue their general crime control ends.

Nor can the narcotics-interdiction purpose of the checkpoints be rationalized in terms of a highway safety concern similar to that present in Sitz. The detection and punishment of almost any criminal offense serves broadly the safety of the community, and our streets would no doubt be safer but for the scourge of illegal drugs. Only with respect to a smaller class of offenses, however, is society confronted with the type of immediate, vehicle-bound threat to life and limb that the sobriety checkpoint in Sitz was designed to eliminate. . . .

The primary purpose of the Indianapolis narcotics checkpoints is in the end to advance "the general interest in crime control." We decline to suspend the usual requirement of individualized suspicion where the police seek to employ a checkpoint primarily for the ordinary enterprise of investigating crimes. We cannot sanction stops justified only by the generalized and ever present possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any given motorist has committed some crime.

Of course, there are circumstances that may justify a law enforcement checkpoint where the primary purpose would otherwise, but for some emergency, relate to ordinary crime control. For example, as the Court of Appeals noted, the Fourth Amendment would almost certainly permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route. . . .

Petitioners argue that our prior cases preclude an inquiry into the purposes of the checkpoint program. For example, they cite Whren v. United States (1996) and Bond v. United States (2000) to support the proposition that "where the government articulates and pursues a legitimate interest for a suspicionless stop, courts should not look behind that interest to determine whether the government's `primary purpose' is valid." These cases, however, do not control the instant situation.

In Whren, we held that an individual officer's subjective intentions are irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment validity of a traffic stop that is justified objectively by probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred. We observed that our prior cases "foreclose any argument that the constitutional reasonableness of traffic stops depends on the actual motivations of the individual officers involved." . . . Last term in Bond v. United States (2000), we addressed the question whether a law enforcement officer violated a reasonable expectation of privacy in conducting a tactile examination of carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment of a bus. In doing so, we simply noted that the principle of Whren rendered the subjective intent of an officer irrelevant to this analysis. While, as petitioners correctly observe, the analytical rubric of Bond was not "ordinary, probable-cause Fourth Amendment analysis," nothing in Bond suggests that we would extend the principle of Whren to all situations where individualized suspicion was lacking. . . .

FROM THE DISSENT By Chief Justice Rehnquist

The state's use of a drug-sniffing dog, according to the court's holding, annuls what is otherwise plainly constitutional under our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: brief, standardized, discretionless, roadblock seizures of automobiles, seizures which effectively serve a weighty state interest with only minimal intrusion on the privacy of their occupants. Because these seizures serve the state's accepted and significant interests of preventing drunken driving and checking for driver's licenses and vehicle registrations, and because there is nothing in the record to indicate that the addition of the dog sniff lengthens these otherwise legitimate seizures, I dissent.

. . . Roadblock seizures are consistent with the Fourth Amendment if they are "carried out pursuant to a plan embodying explicit, neutral limitations on the conduct of individual officers." Specifically, the constitutionality of a seizure turns upon "a weighing of the gravity of the public concerns served by the seizure, the degree to which the seizure advances the public interest, and the severity of the interference with individual liberty." . . .

This case follows naturally from Martinez-Fuerte and Sitz. Petitioners acknowledge that the "primary purpose" of these roadblocks is to interdict illegal drugs, but this fact should not be controlling. Even accepting the court's conclusion that the checkpoints at issue in Martinez- Fuerte and Sitz were not primarily related to criminal law enforcement, the question whether a law enforcement purpose could support a roadblock seizure is not presented in this case. The district court found that another "purpose of the checkpoints is to check driver's licenses and vehicle registrations," and the written directives state that the police officers are to "look for signs of impairment." The use of roadblocks to look for signs of impairment was validated by Sitz, and the use of roadblocks to check for driver's licenses and vehicle registrations was expressly recognized in Delaware v. Prouse (1979). That the roadblocks serve these legitimate state interests cannot be seriously disputed, as the 49 people arrested for offenses unrelated to drugs can attest. And it would be speculative to conclude given the district court's findings, the written directives, and the actual arrests that petitioners would not have operated these roadblocks but for the state's interest in interdicting drugs.

Because of the valid reasons for conducting these roadblock seizures, it is constitutionally irrelevant that petitioners also hoped to interdict drugs. . . .

The reasonableness of highway checkpoints, at issue here, turns on whether they effectively serve a significant state interest with minimal intrusion on motorists. The stop in Whren was objectively reasonable because the police officers had witnessed traffic violations; so too the roadblocks here are objectively reasonable because they serve the substantial interests of preventing drunken driving and checking for driver's licenses and vehicle registrations with minimal intrusion on motorists. . . .

With these checkpoints serving two important state interests, the remaining prongs of the Brown v. Texas (1997) balancing test are easily met. The seizure is objectively reasonable as it lasts, on average, two to three minutes and does not involve a search. The subjective intrusion is likewise limited as the checkpoints are clearly marked and operated by uniformed officers who are directed to stop every vehicle in the same manner. The only difference between this case and Sitz is the presence of the dog. . . .

These stops effectively serve the state's legitimate interests; they are executed in a regularized and neutral manner; and they only minimally intrude upon the privacy of the motorists. They should therefore be constitutional.

---

USA Today
11/29/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Florida

Miami - Three Europeans were arrested on charges of trying to smuggle $3.8 million of Ecstasy through Miami International Airport over the Thanksgiving holiday, U.S. Customs reported. Officers seized a total of 126,739 tablets of the drug from the Dutch, German and French citizens who arrived on separate flights. Each faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted for importation of a controlled substance.

-------- u.n.

Six U.N. officers fired in prostitution sting

USA Today
11/29/00- Updated 06:28 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwswed08.htm

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) - Six U.N. police officers were removed from the Bosnian mission and sent home because of ''inappropriate behavior'' after a raid on three bars, the U.N. said Wednesday.

Local police, assisted by U.N. officers, raided the nightclubs in the Bosnian Serb town of Prijedor on Nov. 13 and found 33 women apparently forced into prostitution - some believed to be as young as 14.

The owner of the clubs, Milorad Milakovic, accused the U.N. police in Prijedor of asking for protection money to avoid police action against him.

Prostitution is illegal in Bosnia, and the U.N. police are deployed in Bosnia to make sure the local police do their job and uphold the rule of law.

Alun Roberts, the U.N. spokesman in Banja Luka, told reporters on Wednesday the officers had been sent home.

''The six were removed for exceeding their duties in the U.N. mandate and also for inappropriate behavior and violation of the U.N. mission code of conduct,'' Roberts said.

Soon after the raids, Milakovic reopened one of his clubs.

Women mainly from countries like Ukraine, Moldova or Romania often use illegal channels to get to Bosnia and decide to stay and work as prostitutes.

Other women, who are told they will get jobs as waitresses in Western Europe once they pass through Bosnia, get stuck here after brothel owners take their passports away.

---

Annan says pollution will hit poor hardest

Washington Times
November 29, 2000
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://208.246.212.80/world/worldscene-20001129213136.htm

NEW YORK - Voicing disappointment at the deadlock in talks on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday poor nations would suffer most from pollution they did not create.

Mr. Annan said he was "disappointed by the inconclusive outcome" of the U.N. climate change conference in The Hague last week and urged governments to make "every effort to bridge the gaps between them so that agreement can be reached at a resumed session next year."

"Developing countries will suffer most from the impacts of climate change - which is already happening - even though they are the least responsible for it," the U.N. chief declared.

-------- u.s.

Cole retaliation may be non-military

USA Today
11/29/00- Updated 07:19 PM ET
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncswed05.htm

WASHINGTON - As the investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole points increasingly toward involvement by terrorist Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials appear to be leaning for now toward diplomatic reprisals rather than a military strike.

Senior White House and Pentagon officials stress that all options remain open. Even so, the first reprisal is expected to be a push for a U.N. arms embargo this week against the Taliban, the Afghan faction that has been sheltering bin Laden for four years.

The United States has an ally in the approach: Russia. The two nations are co-sponsoring a U.N. Security Council resolution against the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement that controls most of Afghanistan. Russian officials allege that bin Laden promotes insurgency in the breakaway Russian province of Chechnya and in former Soviet republics in Central Asia. On Friday, Russia assumes the presidency of the Security Council, a position that gives it added clout. The resolution faces opposition in the Security Council, however, and its prospects are unclear.

The uncertain U.S. presidential election and negative consequences from past counterterrorist strikes make military retaliation, like that following the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, unlikely.

"The talk is about a longer-term approach that might ultimately be more fruitful than lobbing more cruise missiles at more mud huts," says Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert at the Congressional Research Service who consults with U.S. policymakers.

When bin Laden was linked to the embassy bombings, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, U.S. retaliation was swift. The Navy fired 79 cruise missiles at bin Laden camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that the Clinton administration claimed produced chemical weapons.

U.S. officials said the strikes pre-empted other terrorist attacks, but the evidence linking the Sudan plant to bin Laden was shaky. Moreover, the attack on Afghanistan missed bin Laden and made him a hero in the region, where many parents name sons after him.

Since then, U.S. authorities have broken up several new plots, including an attempt to attack Israeli and U.S. tourists in Jordan last Christmas. At the same time, there has been a shift in overall strategy. "The policy now is to dry up the swamp in which terrorists operate," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Rand, a California think tank.

Hoffman was one of four experts who appeared this week at a conference on terrorism at the Cato Institute in Washington. All said any military response to the Cole attack Oct. 12, which killed 17 sailors, should be approached with caution. Among reasons for restraint:

Two months of clashes between Israeli occupation forces and Palestinians have inflamed sentiment throughout the Muslim world against Israel's chief ally, the United States. "Shooting at bin Laden again and missing is likely to strengthen terrorism," says Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. New U.S. attacks on Afghanistan could further destabilize former U.S. ally Pakistan, where support for the Taliban is strong. Missile strikes also could make it harder to urge restraint by Pakistan's archrival, India, which faces Muslim insurgents in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

U.S. concerns that military action would look motivated by presidential politics might have impeded retaliation before the Nov. 7 election. (The 1998 strikes were dubbed "Monica missiles" by critics because President Clinton ordered them at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.) Republican sources close to George W. Bush say he is not eager for a military strike whose consequences would fall in his lap should he win the presidency. The world's 1 billion Muslims are observing Ramadan, a sacred month of daytime fasting. A strike during this period would be particularly inflammatory.

There also is the question of what targets the United States could hit. Missiles, or even special forces in pursuit of bin Laden, might have trouble finding the terrorist. He is believed to spend most of his time hiding in caves.

---

Pentagon to examine military balloting

Washington Times
November 29, 2000
By Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-20001129223229.htm

The Pentagon said yesterday its inspector general will investigate the military's overseas voting system after a Democratic drive to disqualify absentee ballots in Florida exposed flaws in postmarking.

Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon said Pentagon regulations require mail-in ballots to contain a postmark, but he acknowledged that an unspecified number "apparently erroneously" did not receive such a stamp overseas.

Mr. Bacon said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen ordered acting Inspector General Donald Mancuso "to look at the absentee voting process as handled by the military, and to recommend any changes that might be necessary to make it more efficient, more fair and more inclusive, and to make it easier. So, that will happen and I assume that the review will produce recommendations that will be implemented."

The battle between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush for Florida's 25 electoral votes revealed problems in military mail handling and showed how lawyers can exploit those shortcomings to gain votes in an extremely close election.

Democratic lawyers representing the Gore campaign cited the missing postmark to convince local Florida election boards to disqualify hundreds of military ballots opened after the Nov. 7 election. Florida law requires a postmark, but federal law says election panels may accept ballots without the stamp if they are signed and dated.

The systematic operation enraged Republicans as well as service members, who have flooded the Internet with e-mails complaining about the Democrats' tactic. Service members say they cannot always get a postmark on a ship or post. A group of retired officers sent a letter to Mr. Cohen chastising him for not taking up his troops' cause.

Republican lawmakers are vowing an overhaul of the system. Some have traveled to Florida to remind local officials about the federal law.

Since then, several Florida counties took a second look and validated scores of ballots, most of which went to Mr. Bush.

Miami-Dade County alone threw out 110 of 113 overseas military ballots, according to Rep. Steve Buyer, Indiana Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on personnel.

"The men and women of our military, who literally put their lives on the line every day in defense of our right to vote, had their votes thrown out," Mr. Buyer said. "I will continue to determine whether this was a blatant violation of [federal law] that protects against abuses of this kind."

Mr. Bacon said part of the problem may be that, because ballots are mailed postage-free, they do not get a stamp cancellation mark, or postmark.

"So many of these ballots were not postmarked, apparently erroneously, and that was one of the problems in Florida, that the ballots weren't properly postmarked," he said. "So one of the things the IG will look at, obviously, are the postmarking regulations and procedures, to make sure that there is no gap between what the regulations require and what the procedures produce."

Mr. Bacon said the IG review will include "current standard procedures for overseas handling of military ballots, standard cancellation and postmarking procedures, and any discrepancies between established procedures and how those procedures have actually been implemented."

Of about 3,500 overseas ballots counted in Florida after Election Day, county boards nullified about 1,400 ballots. More than half belonged to armed forces personnel.

Mr. Bush, who explicitly sought the votes of veterans and military personnel during the campaign, garnered 65 percent of 2,130 certified, post-election ballots from abroad.

Democratic lawyers fanned out into virtually every Florida county as the state deadline approached for submitting the last batch of absentee ballots. Republican lawyers say their opponents challenged almost every absentee envelope, even asking canvassers to compare the signature on the ballot with the one on file and then objecting if every 't' was not crossed.

Many service members are angry over the maneuver.

"I can properly describe our attitudes toward the Democrats, specifically Gore, as being of an overtly contemptuous nature and to the point of being furious," said a senior Army enlisted soldier in Germany. "I have contact with hundreds of soldiers each week. I cannot say that even one single soldier displays any level of respect for this man and the actions of the Democratic Party."

The Gore team has been unrepentant. Sen. Bob Kerrey, Nebraska Democrat and a Medal of Honor winner, said if personnel did not fill out the paperwork correctly, then they have no one to blame but themselves.

"In the military, we accept responsibility for our mistakes," Mr. Kerrey said. "We don't blame it on somebody else."

He added: "If I'm not prepared, and I didn't get the word, and I come to my commanding officer and say, 'Gee, I'm sorry, captain, I didn't get the word,' my commanding officer will say, 'Lieutenant, failure to get the word is no excuse.' In the day after these ballot accusations are made, what we're discovering is signatures are not there, voter IDs are not there, addresses are not there, witnesses aren't there. Personally, I think the military should not be treated any differently than any other citizen."

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

RECKONINGS Sins of Emission

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By PAUL KRUGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/opinion/29KRUG.html

Sam drives a huge S.U.V., Pierre drives a tiny Citroën. Both agree that for the sake of the environment they must reduce their combined fuel consumption. But who should bear the burden?

You might expect Pierre to demand that Sam do most of the adjusting. All that Sam has to do is switch to a smaller but still comfortable car; Pierre's car can't get much smaller. You certainly wouldn't expect to find Sam trying to wriggle out of the bargain, insisting that he be allowed to adopt a tree instead.

But that, more or less, is why efforts to curb global warming collapsed last week. There's plenty of blame to go around, but the essential problem was that Europeans got fed up with America's unwillingness to reduce its emission of greenhouse gases, even though it is the world's prime source of such gases.

Why is the United States such a big emitter? Energy use tends to be more or less proportional to gross domestic product, and we have the biggest economy. But that's not the whole story: We release about twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as other advanced countries, even though we don't have anywhere near twice their per capita G.D.P. The main reason for that disparity is that we have much lower taxes on fuel, especially gasoline. The image of the American filling up his living room on wheels with dollar-a-gallon gasoline while his European counterpart carefully spoons precious petrol into his mini is a caricature, but gets at an essential truth.

This comparison suggests that it should actually be much easier for the United States to reduce its energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than it is for Europe. High taxes on fuel have already induced Europeans to do the easy conservation steps; in America, where gasoline is literally cheaper than (bottled) water, we haven't even tried.

Now it turns out that there are some complicating factors. Some estimates suggest that the cost of meeting international targets for emission reduction would actually be larger for the U.S. than for Europe, mainly because our economy grows faster, and faster growth increases the demand for energy. Still, one can easily understand European fury at America's refusal to make any serious effort to reduce the amount of carbon it burns.

But don't blame our negotiators, or for that matter the administration they work for. They had to respect domestic political realities. And what could the U.S. actually do to reduce its emission of greenhouse gases?

Any Econ 101 textbook can tell you the answer. If carbon dioxide is deemed to inflict damage on the environment, then the efficient way to resolve the problem is to provide market incentives to burn less carbon. The most straightforward policy would be an across-the-board carbon tax that . . .

I can't see any point in finishing that sentence. Never mind that even free-market economists favor "effluent taxes"; never mind that we're not talking about an overall tax increase, that any new tax on carbon could and should be offset by tax cuts elsewhere. In America's current political universe there are too many people who believe that the only good tax is a dead tax for any such proposal to be accepted. Such people aren't a majority, but they do control at least one house of Congress, and it just isn't going to happen.

In other words, the ultimate reason that the climate talks failed, that global warming will go unchecked, is the power of America's vitriolic anti- tax right.

Is there any way out of this trap? A decisive political defeat for the rabid right might open a path; but that didn't happen in this election.

The only alternative would be a Nixon-goes-to-China scenario. It's nice to fantasize that if George W. Bush ends up in the White House he might try to heal the wounds of his dubious triumph by, among other things, taking on his own party over environmental issues. But quite aside from his oil-industry connections and his dismal environmental record in Texas, Mr. Bush has said he is not convinced that the scientific evidence for global warming warrants policy action. And somehow I don't expect further evidence to change his mind.

Maybe future retirees won't have to move to Florida to find warm weather. It's looking like a long, hot century.

---

New York Times
November 29, 2000
Metro Business Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/nyregion/29BBRF.html

G.E. SUES OVER SUPERFUND LAW General Electric Company filed a lawsuit yesterday asking that provisions of the federal Superfund toxic waste cleanup law be declared invalid. G.E. is arguing that the Superfund's provisions give the Environmental Protection Agency "uncontrolled authority to order intrusive remedial projects of unlimited scope and duration in nonemergency situations." The company is battling with environmentalists and regulators over the cleanup of the upper Hudson River, where the company discharged polycholorinated biphenyls decades ago. Environmentalists and the Pataki administration want the company to dredge the river, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to make a decision on the dredging in the next few weeks. (Dow Jones)

---

Coalition: Ski resorts fail environmentally

USA Today
11/29/00- Updated 09:18 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm

DENVER (AP) - A coalition of environmental groups on Wednesday urged skiers to boycott many of the West's top ski resorts, saying the resorts were not environmentally friendly. The Ski Area Citizens Coalition ranked most resorts in nine states on 12 issues, including development of undisturbed land; altering terrain in wetlands, old-growth forests and roadless property; and water and wildlife management.

Areas planning to expand snowmaking were penalized because environmentalists claim it reduces the flow of streams and can hurt aquatic life. Resorts were awarded points for protecting wildlife habitat, reducing auto pollution and recycling.

Stacy Gardner of the National Ski Areas Association called the report a publicity stunt.

''I'm not confident of their objectivity, and they should have hired an independent third party to do the scorecard,'' she said.

In Colorado, the coalition issued failing grades for Copper Mountain, Telluride and the four ski areas owned by Vail Resorts. In Utah, Deer Valley, the Canyons and Snowbasin did not pass. Nor did Crystal Mountain in Washington.

Grades were not available for major resorts in the Lake Tahoe area. The only California-Nevada resorts listed, Mammoth Mountain and Kirkwood, were given C's.

Eight resorts were given A's: Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk Mountain and Wolf Creek in Colorado; Sundance in Utah; Timerberline in Oregon; 49 Degrees North Mountain in Washington; and Sun Valley and Silver Mountain in Idaho.

Porter Wharton, senior vice president of Vail Resorts, said the scorecard wasn't valid because it automatically downgraded resorts with expansion plans and real estate developments.

Gavin Noyes, program director of Save Our Canyons of Utah, said the scorecard was objective, fair and would be useful to skiers.

''Polls demonstrate by and large that skiers are an environmentally concerned group. Now skiers will have the information they need to act on their environmental ethic,'' he said.

Jeff Proteau, vice president for environmental affairs for Telluride, said the ''F'' was particularly frustrating because his resort's expansion plans were revised to meet the objections of Colorado Wild and other environmental groups in the coalition, which also includes the Crystal Coalition of Washington, Friends of the Inyo of California, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Save Our Canyons of Utah.

-------- genetics

Plan for Use of Bioengineered Corn in Food Is Disputed

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By ANDREW POLLACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/business/29FOOD.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - Hoping to avoid further product recalls linked to a bioengineered corn, representatives of food, agriculture and biotechnology industries urged the Environmental Protection Agency today to approve the corn temporarily for human consumption. But critics said such a move would bail out the corn's developer and the food companies at consumers' expense.

"It is not E.P.A.'s obligation to clean up the mess," said Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Turning on a dime to assist industry would undermine confidence both here and abroad in the E.P.A. as a regulator."

The clash of opinions occurred at a public meeting of a scientific advisory panel to the E.P.A. Until now the agency has approved the corn, StarLink, for animal feed but not for human consumption because of concerns that a protein in the corn could cause allergies.

This fall, taco shells and other products were found to contain some of the corn, prompting nationwide recalls and causing the corn's developer, Aventis CropScience, to promise to buy up this year's StarLink crop and to stop licensing the seed.

But the company, with the backing of much of the food and grain industry, last month asked E.P.A. to approve the use of StarLink in food for four years, long enough for the crops from this year and last to work their way through the food supply.

While the issue at today's meeting was the scientific question of whether such a move would be a risk to the public, the urgency of the issue is more economic. Food companies and grain handlers worry that unless the agency acts, costs will rise because of the expense of testing grain shipments for the presence of StarLink and the potential for further recalls.

But critics say such an exemption could make it easier for Aventis to escape liability for any harm, including farmers' economic losses.

Larry Somerville, director for scientific affairs at Aventis Crop- Science, said today that irrespective of the E.P.A. decision it would "remain committed" to trying to divert the StarLink crop to animal feed.

Aventis, backed by much of the food industry, argues that new evidence shows that the protein at issue in the corn, Cry9C, which is inserted to kill a common pest, is highly unlikely to be an allergen. Even if it were, the company said, consumers are likely to eat such small amounts that no one would develop allergies or suffer allergic reactions.

Today, the Biotechnology Industry Organization offered new data showing that the protein broke down in laboratory tests designed to simulate food processing. Until now, StarLink has been found in food products by testing for the gene implanted into corn to produce the Cry9C protein. But it is the protein, not the gene, that is the potential allergen, and it has been unclear how much, if any, of the protein is in food products. The evidence presented today found the protein in the food products, but in extremely minute concentrations.

"You're starting out with a very low amount of protein in the corn to begin with and then it degrades considerably to the point where you can barely detect it," said Michael Phillips, executive vice president for food and agriculture at the biotechnology industry trade group. "A strong case can be made that this is no hazard."

But a key question for the advisory panel is how small is too small to cause allergic reactions. Dr. Hugh Sampson, an allergy expert from Mount Sinai New York University Medical Center on the advisory panel, challenged a speaker's assumptions that the level of exposure was too low to cause problems.

"I wasn't aware we knew what that threshold was for any protein," Dr. Sampson said.

By the end of the meeting, some of the medical experts on the panel seemed to agree that the probability of significant allergic reactions from the StarLink in food supply was low but could not completely be discounted.

The Cry9C protein, which protects the corn plant from insects, is suspected of being an allergen because it is stable in stomach acids. Proteins that are not digested in the stomach have a higher likelihood of causing allergies, though there is no evidence that StarLink does cause allergies.

Karl C. Klontz, an epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration, said today that the F.D.A. had received 35 reports of adverse health effects from StarLink corn experienced by 44 consumers since mid- September, when it was first reported that StarLink was found in Kraft Foods taco shells. But many seem to be problems other than allergies, and even the apparent allergic reactions have not been definitively linked to StarLink, he and Carol Rubin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. They said the investigation was continuing.

The E.P.A. has asked the panel to deliver a report by the end of the week for the agency to use in its decision on Aventis's request. Stephen Johnson, the agency's deputy assistant administrator, said a decision was likely to take several weeks.

-------- police

U.S. Wrote Outline for Race Profiling, New Jersey Argues

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/nyregion/29FEDS.html

TRENTON, Nov. 28 - Weaving its way through the 91,000 pages of documents on racial profiling released by New Jersey officials is a largely overlooked thread in the national debate on race and crime - although states like New Jersey have been the most egregious offenders, the textbook on singling out minority drivers was written by the federal government.

New Jersey officials contend that the reason racial profiling is a national problem is that it was initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the federal government's war on drugs. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration's Operation Pipeline enlisted police departments across the country to search for narcotics traffickers on major highways and told officers, to cite one example, that Latinos and West Indians dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the D.E.A. and the Department of Transportation have financed and taught an array of drug interdiction programs that emphasize the ethnic and racial characteristics of narcotics organizations and teach the police ways to single out cars and drivers who are smuggling.

Among the characteristics officers in Operation Pipeline have been trained to look for: people with dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males traveling together.

Federal officials contend that they have never taught profiling and that police departments that use racially discriminatory tactics are misapplying the D.E.A.'s intelligence reports. Federal officials have taken several steps in recent years intended to measure the problem, most notably President Clinton's 1999 executive order that any police force that receives federal money for drug interdiction must keep track of the race of anyone stopped, searched or arrested by officers.

But even the national American Civil Liberties Union, a persistent critic of state policies on racial profiling, said much of the blame for the policy fell on the Drug Enforcement Administration.

And in May 1998, as the Department of Justice was investigating whether the New Jersey State Police needed a federal monitor to oversee its efforts to deter profiling, Anthony J. Senneca, agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s Newark office, wrote to state police officials to praise the troopers' methods and effectiveness on the turnpike.

The letter singled out the exemplary work of five troopers, including John Hogan, who one month earlier was involved in the April 1998 shootings of three unarmed minority men on the New Jersey Turnpike, an incident that propelled racial profiling onto the nation's political agenda.

David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who has written extensively about racial profiling, said that the Drug Enforcement Administration had conveyed similar mixed messages across the country and that results of the Operation Pipeline training had led to discrimination in states as diverse as Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico and Texas.

In response to that criticism, the Department of Justice's civil rights division reviewed D.E.A. procedures, including the Operation Pipeline training, in 1997, according to Kara Peterman, a department spokeswoman. She declined to characterize the findings. But two other federal officials said the Justice Department had concluded that the program was sound and that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not encourage or teach profiling.

Civil rights advocates say the Justice Department's response stemmed from a reluctance to criticize an agency it oversees. But New Jersey's attorney general, John J. Farmer Jr., offers a more empathetic interpretation.

"In a lot of ways, the Justice Department in Washington has been going through what we in New Jersey went through," Mr. Farmer said today. "The troopers in the field were given a mixed message. On one hand, we were training them not to take race into account. On the other hand, all the intelligence featured race and ethnicity prominently. So what is your average road trooper to make of all this?"

Few in law enforcement foresaw such an outcome in 1986, when Operation Pipeline began as a way to use municipal police departments as an aggressive force in the national crusade against drugs. The program, which has been used to train more than 25,000 officers in 48 states, offered the police access to Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence reports, which included detailed descriptions of ethnic drug gangs and the cartels.

As early as 1987, however, those D.E.A. updates had been transformed into questionable tactics in New Jersey. One 1987 state police training memo listed the following as identifiers of possible drug couriers: Colombian males, Hispanic males, a Hispanic male and a black male together, or a Hispanic male and female posing as a couple.

Officially, the state police were on record as stating that racial profiling was illegal and prohibited. But in a 1999 memo, Deputy Attorney General Debra L. Stone said her investigation of the force found that in the patrol cars and on the state's highways, "racial profiling exists as part of the culture."

"There's no written policy on it," she said, "but you are taught that if you see `Johnnies' in a `good car,' they don't belong and should be stopped."

Mr. Harris, who wrote the A.C.L.U. report titled "Driving While Black," said a similar pattern of official denials and de facto profiling cropped up in many states where Operation Pipeline was embraced by local commanders.

"The D.E.A. has been the great evangelizer for racial profiling on the highways," he said. "They had used the technique in airports to nab drug couriers and thought this held great promise on the highways. So they taught it to local departments, and because the D.E.A. agents weren't the ones actually pulling over the cars, they've never been really held accountable for it."

Drug Enforcement Administration officials emphatically dispute the notion that they taught or encouraged unequal enforcement of the law.

Michael Chapman, a D.E.A. spokesman, said today that the agency trained officers not to consider race when deciding whether to pull over a car and to use it as only one of many factors when considering whether to search a vehicle.

"We teach them that profiling is illegal and it is also bad investigative technique," Mr. Chapman said.

Nonetheless, much of the Drug Enforcement Administration's emphasis on the race and ethnicity of drug traffickers endures. During the last five years, the D.E.A. has stopped distributing training videos in which all the drug suspects have Spanish surnames. But just last year, the agency's Newark office released the "Heroin Trends" report, which noted:

"Predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Midlevels are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians."

Meanwhile, federal agencies like the Department of Transportation have also sponsored drug interdiction programs that make similar observations. And a 1998 report by Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, stunned New Jersey officials because it gave detailed breakdowns of the ethnic and racial backgrounds of sellers, traffickers and users alike.

Hugh B. Price, president and chief executive of the National Urban League, said today that he hoped that the public attention focused on New Jersey's racial profiling would induce the federal government to address the causes of racial profiling as well as the symptoms, even if part of the blame lay within the Justice Department itself.

"These are federal civil rights that are at risk and are undermined, and we want the federal government to put force on this issue," Mr. Price said.

---

Profiling May Mean Dismissals

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By IVER PETERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/nyregion/29TROO.html

TRENTON, Nov. 28 - The disclosure Monday that New Jersey's top law enforcement officials have known for years of widespread racial profiling could lead to the dismissal of dozens of pending criminal cases, increased scrutiny of Justice Peter G. Verniero of the State Supreme Court and a ratcheting up of investigations of the state's record in singling out minorities as drug and crime suspects, state officials said today.

A spokesman for Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. said today that Mr. Farmer would soon begin to review 105 pending criminal cases arising from traffic stops by the state police, who were shown in documents released by Mr. Farmer Monday to have engaged in widespread singling out of minorities for traffic stops.

Most of the subsequent arrests were for drug or weapons possession, and the defendants all say that the evidence was tainted by the racial nature of the traffic stop. It is not clear how many criminals might try to overturn existing convictions, alleging they resulted from illegal racial profiling.

Meanwhile, at the State House, politicians were gearing up for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into the state's history of racial profiling, and in particular into the role of Mr. Verniero, who was New Jersey's attorney general from 1994 to 1998 and is now a Supreme Court justice.

Allegations that the state engaged in racial profiling were beginning to surface in court complaints at the time of his confirmation, but Mr. Verniero testified that he had no statistical knowledge of the practice. Since then, the state has acknowledged that the practice was common among state police officers patrolling the New Jersey Turnpike.

Mr. Verniero is subject to reconfirmation in 2006, after seven years on the bench, and William L. Gormley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said that the justice might be called as a witness when the profiling hearings begin in February. "What I have said all along is that no one is above the law," Mr. Gormley said.

While the political pot simmers, the legal fallout from Monday's disclosure that racial profiling was common knowledge among senior law enforcement officials approached a boil.

Chuck Davis, a spokesman for Mr. Farmer, said that the attorney general would soon review 105 criminal suits and 5 civil suits against the state and its police to determine whether any of the arrests could be shown to have been the result of racial profiling. That could result in the dismissal of some criminal cases and the settlement of civil suits.

"It doesn't mean we're going to dismiss any or all," Mr. Davis said. "He said he will review the cases and make a determination."

But Joel Harris, first assistant public defender, said Mr. Farmer's list did not include 20 cases from Middlesex County alone. With them and other cases still surfacing from other counties, Mr. Harris said, there are probably 180 in which criminal defendants say they are victims of racial profiling.

The cases will be considered by Judge Walter Barisonek of State Superior Court, who has been charged by the Supreme Court with conducting all pretrial hearings on the cases.

In each criminal case, Mr. Harris said, motorists and passengers who had been stopped on the highway and charged with possession of contraband are raising a racial profiling defense, maintaining that the evidence against them is inadmissible because the practice of singling out minorities for stops is unconstitutional.

In the civil cases, some of which are being supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, motorists who were stopped and not charged have accused the police of illegally singling them out because of their race or ethnicity.

Work on developing the tainted evidence defense cannot wait for Mr. Farmer's review of the cases, Mr. Harris said.

"It would be nice if we could wait for the attorney general to review them and make a determination," he said. "If, in fact, he dismisses all of these we wouldn't have to go through all of the material we have. But there are time constraints that Judge Barisonek has imposed on us, so we don't have the liberty of waiting." The judge has set a Jan. 23 hearing on the consolidated criminal cases.

One of the first issues that will likely come up in the hearings concerns the exact legal status of racial profiling. Defense lawyers uniformly maintain that the practice violates the equal protection clause of the Bill of Rights, but Mr. Farmer on Monday said that the issue was far from clear.

This prompted State Senator Wayne R. Bryant of Camden to call for a law explicitly outlawing the practice and setting penalties for violations of the law.

"I think that's the only way you really end up making folks focus on this," Mr. Bryant said. "If you violate somebody's civil rights, you will face the consequences."

Meanwhile, William Buckman, a defense lawyer who pioneered the racial profiling defense in a 1996 Gloucester County case, said he had begun hearing from prison inmates hoping to have their convictions overturned by using the same defense.

He said he could not yet say what the prospects for overturning existing convictions were, nor guess how many convicts in prisons might have cases matching the pattern of the tainted traffic stop.

"I am selectively looking into these cases and my conscience dictates that I'll get involved in some of them," Mr. Buckman said. But he said he had to focus first on pending cases he was trying to get dismissed.

In addition, Mr. Buckman is part of a class action suit, brought in cooperation with the A.C.L.U., on behalf of people stopped for wrongful reasons and not charged. He said he was trying to have a court certify all motorists stopped under potentially tainted circumstances classified as a group, which is a prelude to bringing the widest possible case.

At any trial that results, Mr. Buckman said, he would try to use the state's own knowledge of the practice of racial profiling to convict it.

---

Widespread Profiling in New Jersey

New York Times
November 29, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/opinion/29WED2.html

The release this week of 91,000 pages of internal documents provides the clearest evidence yet that racial profiling has been standard operating procedure for the New Jersey State Police for years, and that high state officials were aware of it. Indeed, the use of this illegal tactic in stopping and searching vehicles was not merely the habit of a few rogue officers, but was breathtakingly widespread. The documents, released in response to lawsuits, indicate that some 80 percent of all vehicle searches conducted by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike over much of the past decade involved African-American and Hispanic drivers.

The state attorney general, John Farmer Jr., has said that such tactics were encouraged by federal drug enforcement policies that stereotype certain ethnic groups as likely to be involved in drug activity. But that would not excuse New Jersey for its profiling excesses. Wherever the impulse originated, it is illegal to single out minority motorists for stops and searches based solely on their skin color.

For years, state police commanders vehemently denied that profiling took place. The administration of Gov. Christie Whitman, like earlier administrations, simply ignored the complaints. It was only in the aftermath of a 1998 incident in which two troopers fired on four unarmed minority men who were traveling on the turnpike that the Whitman administration was forced to investigate and publicly acknowledge the problem.

The internal papers now show that state officials had clear statistical proof of profiling long before that shooting. A state trial judge ruled in 1996 that troopers had illegally targeted minority drivers along the southern end of the turnpike. But Peter Verniero, the attorney general from 1996 to 1999, who had oversight responsibility for the state police, appealed the ruling and defended the conduct of the troopers. Indeed, one document made public last month suggests that Mr. Verniero, who is now a State Supreme Court justice, was present at a meeting in 1997 where law enforcement officials discussed limiting access to racial profiling evidence by federal officials investigating the problem.

The documents show how little state officials cared about rooting out illegal discrimination despite their knowledge of the problem. New Jersey is now operating under a consent decree with the Justice Department, with a federal monitor overseeing state police reforms. But the damage to public trust will take years to rebuild.

---

Oakland struggles with cop scandal

USA Today
11/29/00- Updated 03:23 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/ndswed07.htm

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Officer Keith Batt was a 23-year-old rookie just three weeks out of the academy. He went straight to the night shift, where most officers start their careers.

There, on patrol in west Oakland, one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, Batt met The Riders.

For three weeks in June and July, prosecutors say, the rookie watched his fellow officers beat, harass and falsely arrest at least 10 people.

Then, on July 3, he allegedly saw a man arrested on trumped-up charges he that he was seen discarding 17 rocks of cocaine.

Batt had seen enough.

The rookie reported what he saw and quit the force, setting in motion a police corruption scandal that has led to the arrest of four officers and the dismissal of scores of cases.

Exactly how far and wide The Riders scandal will reach remains to be seen, despite Police Chief Richard Word's insistence that the alleged abuse was limited to the four officers.

''It's burying one's head in the sand to assume these cases are confined to a short period of time involving these four officers,'' said lawyer John Burris, who has talked to at least 15 people arrested by The Riders about suing.

The four officers - Frank Vazquez, 44, Clarence ''Chuck'' Mabanag, 35, Jude Siapno, 32, and Matthew Hornung, 29 - were charged Nov. 2 with offenses including assault, kidnapping and filing false reports.

Three are expected to enter pleas on Dec. 6; Vazquez is a fugitive, believed to be hiding in Mexico.

Lawyers for the three officers, who are on paid leave, said they have seen no evidence backing up the charges. Mabanag's lawyer, Michael Rains, said the officers are ''both sad and anxious to have their stories heard.'' Vazquez's lawyer has not returned repeated calls.

While the charges are limited to what Batt witnessed, the department is re-examining the officers' records and looking at whether other members of the force were involved.

Prosecutor David Hollister said 49 mostly drug-related cases - convictions and pending cases alike - have been dismissed and more could fall apart as his office sorts through all cases involving the four officers dating back 18 months before they were taken off the streets.

Community advocates said calls and letters are pouring in from people saying they were mistreated by The Riders, and several lawsuits are expected. Some fear juries may not be so quick to trust the word of police officers anymore.

And everyone hears echoes of the Rampart scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Police Department this year.

Three Los Angeles officers have been convicted of framing suspects, more than 100 cases have been thrown out and more than 70 civil rights suits have been filed.

The city attorney estimated the scandal could cost Los Angeles at least $125 million.

According to Batt, his training officer, Mabanag, warned him after he joined the force not to be a ''snitch.'' And his superior officer, Vazquez, told him to forget everything he had learned at the academy as he worked the streets of west Oakland, a poor, mostly black section.

It is hard to find people in west Oakland who have not had or heard about a run-in with The Riders, particularly Vazquez. Nicknamed ''Choker,'' the officer is short with close-cropped hair, a pockmarked face and an earring. He bears a tattoo with his wife's name, Pilar, on his right arm.

The Oakland department had reason to be proud before the scandal broke. Crime in the city of 370,000 had dropped 15.8% from 1998 to 1999, more than twice the national average.

Mayor Jerry Brown, who demanded the resignation of Oakland's popular police chief shortly after taking office and replaced him with Word last July, had made safer streets a key part of his economic development message, arguing that Oakland is on the rebound and ready for the same infusion of money from high-tech companies that have poured into San Francisco and other Bay Area cities.

''The vast majority of people would like to see more police in Oakland and no slackening in the vigilance against crime,'' Brown said Tuesday. As for the scandal, ''you're talking about a fraction of the police department, and people make mistakes. We're taking corrective steps.''

Some critics said officers are under too much pressure to produce arrests.

''Many of these officers are young people in their 20s and when they hear the mayor of a city making warlike statements, that this drug activity should be stopped at any cost, those directives can be misapplied. That may be what happened here,'' said Jim Chanin, a lawyer who has filed the first federal civil rights lawsuit in the scandal.

Chanin's client, 19-year-old Rodney Mack - the young man whose arrest prompted Batt to report his colleagues - alleges police planted crack in his pocket when they broke up a dice game. He spent more than a month in jail before the charges were dismissed.

''They could've arrested him for playing dice,'' Chanin said. ''There was pressure to clean up the area and what better way to show that than with a large number of drug arrests?''

---

FBI searching Los Alamos for Lee tapes


USA Today
11/29/00- Updated 03:54 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndswed06.htm

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - FBI agents resumed their digging in a snow-covered county landfill on Wednesday in a search for computer tapes containing nuclear weapons data from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The agents had used a bulldozer to move mounds of garbage Tuesday and erected a large floodlight to work late into the night in the search for missing tapes on which former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee downloaded the restricted information.

Lee has said he discarded the tapes. If anything were thrown into the trash at the laboratory, the landfill is one place it could end up, lab spokesman James Rickman said.

FBI agent Doug Beldon confirmed Wednesday that the search had resumed.

Beldon had said Tuesday that the FBI was searching the Los Alamos landfill but neither he nor Justice Department officials would elaborate.

However, a source with knowledge of the case, insisting on anonymity, confirmed the search relates to the Lee investigation.

The search is expected to last several weeks.

Trash from the laboratory would have been compressed, said Ray Sisneros, solid waste manager for Los Alamos County.

He said the tapes would be buried in a layer of trash 6 to 8 feet deep and covered by 2 feet of topsoil.

After spending nine months in custody, Lee was freed Sept. 13 when he pleaded guilty to one count of illegally downloading restricted data to an unsecure tape.

Fifty-eight counts were dropped.

The former nuclear scientist swore he never passed secrets to any unauthorized person and that he disposed of the tapes when his security clearance was revoked last year.

Stacy Cohen, a Los Angeles spokeswoman for the Lee family and legal team, said she could not comment on the landfill search, but added: ''Wen Ho continues to cooperate with the government.''

Lee attorney John Cline said he didn't know about the search until reporters called him. Assistant U.S. Attorney George Stamboulidis declined to comment.

Former U.S. Attorney John Kelly, who began the prosecution of Lee last year, first mentioned the landfill the day before Lee was freed.

Lee has been undergoing a debriefing in which he agreed, as a condition of his plea agreement, to answer agents' questions about what happened to the data tapes.

Because of that, Kelly had said: ''We're going to know whether those tapes are in Taiwan or in a bank-deposit box at Bank of America or in the Los Alamos County landfill.''

Agents had said their concern over seven data tapes led them to oppose bail for Lee during nine months of pretrial wrangling.

Agents found three data tapes early on and demanded to know what happened to the others, which contained nuclear weapons testing and design data.

After he was released, Lee told investigators for the first time that he had made copies of all 10 tapes and had disposed of the copies as well, FBI and Justice Department officials reported in September.

-------- terrorism

Judge Orders Confiscation of Papers in Terror Case

New York Times
November 29, 2000
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/nyregion/29TERR.html

Citing "significant security concerns," a federal judge in Manhattan has authorized government agents to enter the cells of five inmates awaiting trial in a terrorism case and remove documents and other materials that prosecutors say are inflammatory and could incite violence by the prisoners.

The materials were originally seized by investigators in the terrorism case and copies were later given to the defendants, through their lawyers, under a pretrial process known as discovery.

But the federal prosecutors recently asked the judge, Leonard B. Sand of Federal District Court in Manhattan, to have the materials removed from the defendants' cells after the recent stabbing of a guard in the federal jail in Lower Manhattan where all five defendants had been held. Two defendants, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, have been accused, though not charged, in the attack. They have since been transferred to other jails.

Among the materials were copies of two interviews given by Osama bin Laden to a satellite channel based in Qatar. It was not clear whether the prisoners had videotapes or transcripts.

In one interview, conducted on June 10, 1999, Mr. bin Laden, believed to be living under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan, renewed his call for a holy war against the United States. The other interview was broadcast in September of this year, the judge's order says.

All five defendants have been charged with participating in a global terrorism conspiracy organized by Mr. bin Laden. Prosecutors say the conspiracy included bombings at two United States embassies in East Africa in August 1998, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands.

Judge Sand's ruling, which was made public yesterday, lists six other items, including documents in Arabic and English related to bombing and military training, and a copy of a fatwa, or Islamic religious opinion.

The ruling does not say whether the fatwa was issued by Mr. bin Laden, but prosecutors have said Mr. bin Laden has issued such opinions, calling for attacks on Americans.

In allowing the government to remove the materials, Judge Sand cited the stabbing of the guard, Louis Pepe, in the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Nov. 1, and said he was acting to "prevent any unnecessary risk of violence." The attack left Mr. Pepe in critical condition.

Judge Sand said he acted after prosecutors said they wanted to restrict the defendants' access "to discovery materials that are particularly inflammatory or which could be used to plan violence or an escape from custody."

The judge indicated that the defendants are being permitted to keep other discovery materials. He also ordered that the materials that are removed should be turned over to defense lawyers, who "shall remain free to discuss the content of any such materials with their clients."

"The sole purpose of this order," the judge wrote, "is to remove copies of such materials from prison facilities" but not to prevent defense lawyers from discussing the materials with their clients.

Much of the discovery material cited by the judge was originally seized by the government in searches in the United States and overseas during the terrorism investigation.

Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said yesterday that Ms. White's office would have no comment.

Sam A. Schmidt and Joshua L. Dratel, lawyers for one of the defendants, Wadih El-Hage, who was not accused in the attack on the guard, said about the removal of the materials: "The government has these concerns. We disagree with those concerns."

But, they added, the government's request went uncontested because "it is unimportant and there are far more important things that we really do have to address before trial."

Because the legal papers filed by the government and the transcript of the hearing at which the issue arose remain secret, it was not clear what was said before the judge.

In his ruling, the judge said that the agents who remove the materials may not be part of the team prosecuting or investigating the case, apparently to ensure that the prosecution does not see any notes made on the materials by the defendants. Four of the defendants are scheduled for trial on Jan. 3. A fifth is to be tried later.

-------- activists

New York Times
November 29, 2000
Metro Briefing NEW YORK
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/29/nyregion/29MBRF.html

ALBANY: ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUP CRITICIZED An animal rights group's plan to hand out trading cards criticizing cow's milk is "sickening and pathetic," the state's dairy industry said yesterday. The group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, intends to offer "Milk Suckers" cards at schools, including a middle school in Albany. The cards say dairy consumption can cause acne. A spokesman for the dairy industry accused the group of "maliciously preying upon kids through a campaign riddled with misinformation." (AP)

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